GoblinX Premium 2007.1

GoblinX developers released their 2007.1 Premium version of GoblinX Linux recently and I was able to obtain the 1-cd version for testing. GoblinX has always been a very interesting project to watch with their odd-looking almost macabre-themed XFCE distro. It's based on Slackware, so you know they have a good foundation and XFCE is coming into its own. With new versions of GoblinX being released about once per year, it's hard to pass up the chance to test it when a new one arrives on the scene.

"GoblinX is a Live-CD that is based on the excellent Slackware, developed and maintained by Flavio de Oliveira a.k.a Grobsch and created by using Linuxlive scripts."

As mentioned, GoblinX is one of the most unique looking distributions available. If you are one who marches to his own drummer, then GoblinX is definitely for you. The boot process hasn't changed much from 2006.1 and starts out with the Halloween flavored boot splash that features what appears to be a goblin. F2 and F3 offer a multitude of booting options, one of particular note is the "nofirewall" option. The boot process is silent by default and adorned with another one of GoblinX's original backgrounds. The verbose boot is similar looking to Slax and Wolvix in that one can see modules for the various subsystems being loaded. The verbose screen is decorated with thumbnails of the various GoblinX desktops. In the end one is brought to a text login and given complete instructions how to procede.

One is given the login and password and typing "go" will start the default desktop of XFCE4. The strangely appealing orangy-yellow theme is still present as seen last year. If one uses "xes" they can choose from other popular desktops such as KDE 3.5.4, Windowmaker, Enlightenment DR16, or Fluxbox. Each is customized to the unique GoblinX flavor and coordinates with each other very well. They aren't exact duplicates of each other, instead featuring differing wallpapers, slightly varying color schemes, and individual themes. Each is unmistakenably GoblinX. If preferable, there are some customization options (such as other wallpapers or themes) available as well.

In any of the desktops you choose, there is a large amount of applications available, even in my 1-disk package. The menus are fairly consistant across desktops and contain many fun and productive tools and apps. Some of the big names one might expect are found, such as The Gimp, Firefox & Thunderbird, XMMS, Gaim, Mplayer, and several cd/dvd rip & burn apps. Office needs are handled with Abiword, Gnumeric, and Criawips. It comes with several shells and over a 1/2 dozen simple editors like Gedit, Kate and Leafpad. Games include Wesnoth, Blob Wars, Frozen Bubble, and Star Fighter. In addition, the menus are chocked full of other utilities to help one connect to the net and media use and creation. Also of notes are Dolphin and Conky. Under the hood we find X 6.9.0, gcc 3.4.6, and Linux 2.6.18.

Besides bundling lots of open source software, GoblinX includes their own tools for system management. Several of these are housed within the Magic Center. The Magic Center is a control panel similar to the PCLinuxOS Control Center or openSUSE Control Center. It contains easily accessible pathways to system configuration modules in one nicely organized application. One of the pages is Hardware Settings with such options as Video & Monitor, Laptop Battery, and Set Printers. Another is Network and Internet settings with Network Settings, Dialup Connection, and Firewall. Modules is for Remastering the Livecd or working with Modules. Advance Settings is used for things such as Login Manager, Configuring Lilo, and setting the time & date as well as opening the Software Master. Desktop Appearance and System Performance are other areas. System Performance has options such as System and Partition information, Daemons Control, System Logs, and Process Monitoring. The KDE Control Center can be brought up from any of the pages as can an Explorer (which is actually the XFCE4 file manager).

The Software Master is a just that. It provides tools to install GoblinX packages through Gslapt, installing other types of software such as source packages or debs and rpms, and working with modules.

In order to fully use and enjoy the previously mentioned software packagers and installers, one should install GoblinX to their harddrive. GoblinX comes with its own installer. Featuring similar options as other installers, GoblinX's is still very unique in appearance. It offers one the chance to prepare partitions if needed using GParted. Then one sets the target partition and is given the chance to exclude any modules they may not want. After the initial install, a screen opens to allow for setting the root password and primary user account. Next one can select one of the 5 default languages and set boot level, monitor resolution, and if to save configs from the running livecd mode. Lastly one sets up their bootloader.

GoblinX is a truly unique looking Linux experience. Even today with all the themes and 3D effects, many distros look so similar as to sometimes make distinction difficult. This won't be a problem with GoblinX. It can't be confused with any other.

This time around I found most of the applications operative, high performing, and stable. I still had difficulty with the installer, but after all this time I'm beginning to suspect it's specific to my hardware setup. I had to use the nofirewall option if I wanted to connect to the internet. I didn't examine the iptables script to see what the exact issue was, but --list didn't reveal any blockers. Just disabling it after boot didn't clear it. Mplayer seemed to be missing a library or two and wouldn't open. Noatun had problems playing videos requiring additional codecs. Java is included with the 2 cd set and Firefox automagically installs flash.

Again, one of the most admirable qualities today is found in GoblinX - that's the courage to be different. I also like that there are several window managers/desktop environments to choose from. Not many today offer this kind of choice anymore due to what I speculate might be lack of interest, developers, or image space. All in all, I believe everyone should give this unique distro a test run for themselves.

Cdroms are available at On-Disk.com. The various GoblinX CD packages available for this release include:

2007.1 Premium 2 CD set contains docs, help pages, tutorials, fonts, themes,
wallpapers and other archives removed from the livecd. It also includes more applications such as Emacs, D4x, Genpower, Firestarter, Griffith, Xfractint and Java Runtime (JRE) as well as all other languages not added by default.

2007.1 Premium 5 CD set includes three cdroms with source code packages, GoblinX builds and necessary files to compile applications from source.

At 167MB, GoblinX 2.0 "Mini" "is the son of GoblinX and contains only the Xfce windows manager and GTK+-based applications."

More in Tux Machines

An Easy Fix for a Stupid Mistake

I waited a long time for Mageia 7 and for OpenMandriva Lx 4. When both distros arrived, I was very happy.
But new distros bring changes, and sometimes it is not easy to adapt. Mageia 7 has been rock-solid: it is doing a great job in my laptop and both in my daughter's desktop and in mine. There is one thing, though. I have been avoiding a strange mesa update that wants to remove Steam.
OpenMandriva is also fantastic, but this new release provided options like rock, release, and rolling. When I first installed the distro, I chose rock because I was shying away from the rolling flavor. Eventually, I had to move to rolling because that was the only way in which I could manage to install Steam in both my laptop and desktop machines.

today's leftovers

Intel's speedy Clear Linux distribution could be running under the hood of your car.
While we're fascinated by the performance of Intel's open-source Clear Linux distribution that it offers meaningful performance advantages over other distributions while still focused on security and offering a diverse package set, we often see it asked... who uses Clear Linux? Some argue that Clear Linux is just a toy or technology demo, but it's actually more.

Radeon ROCm 2.7.2 is now available as the newest update to AMD's open-source GPU compute stack for Linux systems.
ROCm 2.7.2 is a small release that just fixes the upgrade path when moving from older ROCm releases, v2.7.2 should now be running correctly. This release comes after the recent ROCm 2.7.1 point release that had corrected some components from properly loading the ROC tracer library.

There's an exciting patch set to GNOME Shell and Mutter now pending for finally wiring up the full-screen unredirected display / full-screen bypass compositing for helping the performance of full-screen games in particular on Wayland.
GNOME on X11 has long supported the full-screen compositing bypass so the window manager / compositor gets out of the way when running full-screen games/applications. That support under Wayland hasn't been in place and thus there is a performance hit for full-screen Wayland-native software. But now thanks to Red Hat's Jonas Ådahl, that infrastructure now appears to be ready.

After almost three years of research, planning and development we're proud to present the first public version of Xabber Server. Server is licensed under GNU AGPL v3 license, source code is available on GitHub. It is a fork of superb open source source XMPP server ejabberd by ProcessOne, with many custom protocol improvements an an all-new management panel.

After a summer hiatus during which I only released new packages for KDE Frameworks because they addressed a serious security hole, I am now back in business and just released KDE-5_19.09 for Slackware-current.
The packages for KDE-5_19.09 are available for download from my ‘ktown‘ repository. As always, these packages are meant to be installed on a full installation of Slackware-current which has had its KDE4 removed first. These packages will not work on Slackware 14.2. On my laptop with slackware64-current, this new release of Plasma5 runs smooth.

Later, the County official discovered that the two men were in fact, hired by the state court administration to try to "access" court records through "various means" to find out potential security vulnerabilities of the electronic court records.

The state court administration acknowledged that the two men had been hired, but said they were not supposed to physically break into the courthouse.

Mark M5BOP reports the complete set of amateur radio technical talks from this year's Martlesham Microwave Round Table is now available to watch on YouTube
Videos of these MMRT 2019 talks are available:
• Practical GNUradio - Heather Lomond M0HMO

On the road to change, you’ll encounter fear and loathing. People will undoubtedly cling to old ways of working. Successfully making it to the other side will require commitment, passionate change agents, and unwavering leadership. You might wonder – is it really worth it?
Leaders who have made the switch to agile project management say that it has delivered benefits both large and small to their organizations, from the rituals that bring their team together – like daily stand-ups – to the results that make their business stronger – like better end products and happier customers.

Borislav Petkov has taken to improve the Linux kernel's memset function with it being an area previously criticzed by Linus Torvalds and other prominent developers.
Petkov this week published his initial patch for better optimizing the memset function that is used for filling memory with a constant byte.

In addition to the work being led by DigitalOcean on core scheduling to make Hyper Threading safer in light of security vulnerabilities, IBM and Oracle engineers continue working on Kernel Address Space Isolation to help prevent data leaks during attacks.
Complementing the "Core Scheduling" work, Kernel Address Space Isolation was also talked about at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. The address space isolation work for the kernel was RFC'ed a few months ago as a feature to prevent leaking sensitive data during attacks like L1 Terminal Fault and MDS. The focus on this Kernel ASI is for pairing with hypervisors like KVM as well as being a generic address space isolation framework.

While Intel CPUs aren't shipping with 5-level paging support, they are expected to be soon and distribution kernels are preparing to enable the kernel's functionality for this feature to extend the addressable memory supported. With that, the mainline kernel is also looking at flipping on 5-level paging by default for its default kernel configuration.
Intel's Linux developers have been working for several years on the 5-level paging support for increasing the virtual/physical address space for supporting large servers with vast amounts of RAM. The 5-level paging increases the virtual address space from 256 TiB to 128 PiB and the physical address space from 64 TiB to 4 PiB. Intel's 5-level paging works by extending the size of virtual addresses to 57 bits from 48 bits.

Using open source software is commonplace, with only a minority of companies preferring a proprietary-first software policy. Proponents of free and open source software (FOSS) have moved to the next phases of open source adoption, widening FOSS usage within the enterprise as well as gaining the “digital transformation” benefits associated with open source and cloud native best practices.
Companies, as well as FOSS advocates, are determining the best ways to promote these business goals, while at the same time keeping alive the spirit and ethos of the non-commercial communities that have embodied the open source movement for years.

Releasing Slax 9.11.0

New school year has started again and next version of Slax is here too :) this time it is 9.11.0. This release includes all bug fixes and security updates from Debian 9.11 (code name Jessie), and adds a boot parameter to disable console blanking (console blanking is disabled by default).
You can get the newest version at the project's home page, there are options to purchase Slax on DVD or USB device, as well as links for free download.
Surprisingly for me we skipped 9.10, I am not sure why :)
I also experimented with the newly released series of Debian 10 (code name Buster) and noticed several differences which need addressing, so Slax based on Debian 10 is in progress, but not ready yet. Considering my current workload and other circumstances, it will take some more time to get it ready, few weeks at least.
Also: Slax 9.11 Released While Re-Base To Debian 10 Is In Development

Latest News

A Setback for FOSS in the Public (War) Sector, CONNECT Interoperability Project Shifting to the Private Sector

The Department of Defense has not fully implemented mandates from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to increase its use of open-source software and release code, according to a September 10 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.
The report notes that the 2018 NDAA mandated DoD establish a pilot program on open source and a report on the program’s implementation. It also says that OMB’s M-16-21 memorandum requires all agencies to release at least 20 percent of custom-developed code as open-source, with a metric for calculating program performance.
However, DoD has released less than 10 percent of its custom code, and had not developed a measure to calculate the performance of the pilot program. In comments to GAO, the DoD CIO’s office said there has been difficulty inventorying all of its custom source code across the department, and disagreement on how to assess the success for a performance measure. While the department worked to partially implement OMB’s policy, the department had not yet issued a policy.

The Defense Department has been slow to meet a government-wide mandate to release more open-source software code, as DOD officials have concerns about cybersecurity risks and are struggling to implement such a program across the department, according to a new audit.

The Department of Defense’s congressionally mandated efforts to create an open source software program aren’t going so well.
DOD must release at least 20 percent of its custom software as open source through a pilot required by a 2016 Office of Management and Budget directive and the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act. Open source software, OMB says, can encourage collaboration, “reduce costs, streamline development, apply uniform standards, and ensure consistency in creating and delivering information.”

The Defense Department has been slow to meet a government-wide mandate to release more open-source software code, as DOD officials have concerns about cybersecurity risks and are struggling to implement such a program across the department, according to a new audit. Since 2016, DOD has been required by law to implement an open-source software pilot program in accordance with policy established by the Office of Management and Budget.

The CONNECT project, an open source project that aims to increase interoperability among organizations, is transitioning from federal stewardship to the private sector and will soon be available to everyone.
Developed ten years ago by a group of federal agencies in the Federal Health Architecture (FHA), CONNECT was a response to ONC’s original approach to a health information network. The agencies decided to build a joint health interoperability solution instead of having each agency develop its own custom solution, and they chose to make the project open source.

Linux VR Headset

Since most VR Headsets support Windows platforms today, there are very few options for Linux users. Despite its support, many people have faced troubles setting up and running their Headsets on Linux. However, not anymore. The VR gaming experience is now getting better!
The all-new Xrdesktop is an open-source development that lets you work with various desktop environments like GNOME and KDE. Since this project is under progress right now, we can hope for more features like Steam, Valve and other platforms for gaming and Virtual Reality experience.
In addition, the Xrdesktop will also offer integration with Windows as well. Once completed, it will be a great step towards traditional Linux desktop environments. The program is available for installation in both packages for Ubuntu Linux and Arch Linux.